PC What was the point of the water change?

Renathras said:
I feel like this completely negates your prior point.
Click to expand...


I'm not sure what prior point you're talking about since you responded to me almost a week later and I can't remember. Sorry you feel that I self-negated myself?

Renathras said:
By this token, why not make you auto-consume the Honey from the tree stump then and there?
Click to expand...


Uh...because the stump is destroyed when you get the single jar of honey and the lake isn't? I guess if the stump was unbreakable with infinite reserves of honey inside then the devs would let you auto-consume the honey rather than taking infinite jars of it away or I guess they could allow you to gather a jar of murky water from the lake at the moment that it is completely destroyed by doing so. I think the way it is makes more sense.

Renathras said:
Oh, because it's about limiting water survival, not about realism? It's about forcing people to do content they dislike instead of the game being a sandbox that lets players play how they want? It's about nerfing things, no matter how irrational and illogical it is to do so, instead of just letting people have fun in a video game?
Click to expand...


It's about changing water survival from having no gameplay presence to having a gameplay presence. Whether you feel that the gameplay TFP designed is fun or not is your very own valid opinion. There are plenty of people having fun and plenty of people not having fun with the same changes. The game is becoming an actual full-fledged game that will involve limitations and rules that weren't there before. It has some sandbox elements just like it has elements of several other genres. It is not a dedicated sandbox game although you can make it so by enabling the creative menu and godmode. Just because you can't understand the rationality and the logic of the changes doesn't mean they are irrational and illogical. Just because you aren't having fun doesn't mean they aren't fun.

I've loaded in overhaul mods that I played for about an hour before uninstalling because I wasn't having fun. Does that mean the mod author made their changes to the game in order to prevent people from having fun with 7 Days to Die? Did they mod it on purpose to make the game worse? Obviously not. I just didn't like the changes, myself. I didn't go to that mod author's thread and rant about how stupid their changes were and ask why they would do such irrational and illogical modifications to make the game unfun for everyone. That would just be rude to do to someone who obviously put a lot of thought and effort into the mod. Instead, I simply realized that the changes weren't for me but that they probably were fun for other people and I looked elsewhere. If that mod author did happen to ask for my feedback I would have given the reasons I didn't find it fun and leave it at that. I certainly wouldn't demand that he change his mod to suit me.

Renathras said:
I genuinely don't mean to be antagonistic, but this statement I quoted negates every argument in favor of removing glass jars. It says the change was not to make inventory easier (seriously, glass jars stacking to 125 was HARDLY the cause of anyone's inventory woes when we have so many other random things - take a wrench to a vehicle and you just filled half to two-thirds of your inventory!), it was not because of some logic of "you have tons of free jars on you", or to reduce server backend item management or free one or two item registries up so you could add 2 new items in their place (and the very idea that would be an issue in the first place in a game in the year 2023 is just absurd).

All this proves is that the change was specifically to make gameplay dealing with water more annoying, and that making it more annoying was such an imperative to the programmers they broke half the rest of the game in their Quixotic quest to nerf water availability.
Click to expand...


Your problem is that you are looking for the one ring to rule all reasons why the change was made. There isn't just one reason. There are lots of reasons and I've spelled them all out ad nauseum plus I don't think they would change your mind if I did it again

. The fact that you think that the change was specifically made to make gameplay more annoying shows your incredible inability to think beyond your own personal mindset. It may be that you find the changes annoying but that was not the goal and it is pretty naive that you think that it is. Every change the devs make are the purpose of improving the fun factor of the game. You can agree or disagree that they succeeded but to say that they set out to do things intentionally to make the game less fun is incredibly shortsighted.

Renathras said:
I feel like the solution would have just to make it harder to boil water, like requiring a beaker or distiller. That would have achieved all the things that this change has forced, but actually be logical (a distiller generating heat makes more sense than a dew collector generating heat, too) without breaking other crafting and other aspects of the game.
Click to expand...


Talk is cheap. What you have here is an elevator pitch of an idea. So test it out and prove that it would have achieved all the things this change set out to do. Either mod your game or self-restrict yourself however you need to to simulate your design. After all, that is exactly what the devs are doing. They designed a change and implemented and tested it for months and now are having the player base test it and they are making adjustments as they go. So test your own idea and if turns out really good then see if you can get it made into a mod.

Renathras said:
Heck, you can still get the helmet water filter or the book that lets you drink murky water, so getting your hands on either still negates the entire change system.
Click to expand...


A chance for a helmet water filter is not the same as guaranteed infinite water bottle gathering from a lake. I felt disappointed both times I found the helmet water filter and simply sold them for money since I wanted to play the water survival gameplay because I think it's fun. Since you find it annoying I'm surprised you aren't overjoyed to have the helmet water filter mod. That gives you exactly what you want which is probably why the devs left it in. That way people who want infinite water early on can have it and those who don't will have some games where it is forced since they don't find the mod or chosen since they can just sell it if they want.

I don't know about any book that lets you drink murky water.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Easy solution that preserves what they are trying to do.

Set water back the way it was.

Leave jars consumable on use, as they are now.

Add them as a recipe that requires a forge, sand and clay to make.

Preserves early survivability difficulty until you can get a forge set up. Frankly after that point it isn't hard to get enough water to survive from scounging.

This way, the people who want to make use of the trader can still do so.

The people who want to ignore the trader and just forge their own way can do so.

Stockpiling water was never addressed by this change so that is a non-issue.

It does, however, allow people to alleviate the bottleneck of murky water for glue and other uses.

Also put in a recipe for crafting filters with a recipe like a bucket, charcoal, sand and stones(gravel). Hell I can make one right now with A ziplock bag, charcoal, sand and gravel.

As it is right now you HAVE to use the trader for Dew collectors and I'd wager a fair number of people don't want to have to rely on traders.

 
Roland said:
Talk is cheap. What you have here is an elevator pitch of an idea. So test it out and prove that it would have achieved all the things this change set out to do. Either mod your game or self-restrict yourself however you need to to simulate your design.
Click to expand...
I'm not a modder. I've only ever played the vanilla game. Can you teach me to make a mod to do this so we can test it out? That sounds like a lot more work for you, but I suppose we can do that if you want to.

As for the gameplay:

As I said in another thread: That'd be an argument if it wasn't ridiculously easy to get water by questing. Run a Tier 1 quest. Get 600 Dukes. Go to the Trader you just turned the quest into. Buy 5 waters. Now you're good on drinks for 2-4 in-game days, and it only took you 1/3rd or so of a day to run that quest. What's that, the Trader doesn't have any drinks? Well, today's your lucky day! Right outside their door (or sometimes in the same room) is a vending machine that ALSO sells drinks at the same low, low prices. They also restock every 3-4 days (Traders and Vending Machines), making this a permanent source of fluid.

In one game, I haven't bothered to build a base. Just done quests and bought all the food and drink I needed. I literally have had LESS water issues on that map than any of the maps I've tried base building. I can do 2-4 tier 1 quests in a day, which is enough for me to buy all the water and teas I need, no dew collector required. It's gotten me thinking most of the people saying the change is no big deal are also people that quest and run POIs all the time, and so to them, literally nothing has changed from the way they played before, so to them, it IS no big deal because nothing changed.

When I say more annoying, it's because we went from having two viable ways to secure water (questing or gathering) to having one-ish (questing/POI running). A single Tier 1 quest will give you enough water for at least a day. A day of Tier 1s (4, maybe more if you rush it) will give you enough water to last a week. And the Vending Machine at the Trader will have enough fluid to give it to you. And if it doesn't, the Trader will. And if they somehow don't, there are other Vending Machines nearby, and all of these things restock every couple says.

Where's the "difficulty" here?

The difficulty didn't change at all. If anything, it's super easy too have all the water you need just by running a Tier 1 quest every other day. The only thing that changed is it's more onerous to get water if you don't like questing, and/or it's not possible to have sustainable water unless you have a yucca and berry farm in the snow biome. It made one playstyle less viable while not changing another playstyle, and so didn't make water management any more difficult, it just made one way that could be used non-viable while having no change to water management of another playstyle which was already easy to begin with.

 
Renathras said:
I'm not a modder. I've only ever played the vanilla game. Can you teach me to make a mod to do this so we can test it out? That sounds like a lot more work for you, but I suppose we can do that if you want to.
Click to expand...


There are plenty of tutorials for making xml-based modlets. It's super easy. I'm not a programmer and I was able to figure it out in an afternoon and create some basic changes for myself. You can also force the change in a vanilla game by the way you choose to play in order to simulate the change. Lots of people stopped using empty jars while still playing A20 to try simulating A21 at least partially. You don't me.

See? Zero work for me. :)

Renathras said:
As for the gameplay:

As I said in another thread: That'd be an argument if it wasn't ridiculously easy to get water by questing. Run a Tier 1 quest. Get 600 Dukes. Go to the Trader you just turned the quest into. Buy 5 waters. Now you're good on drinks for 2-4 in-game days, and it only took you 1/3rd or so of a day to run that quest. What's that, the Trader doesn't have any drinks? Well, today's your lucky day! Right outside their door (or sometimes in the same room) is a vending machine that ALSO sells drinks at the same low, low prices. They also restock every 3-4 days (Traders and Vending Machines), making this a permanent source of fluid.

In one game, I haven't bothered to build a base. Just done quests and bought all the food and drink I needed. I literally have had LESS water issues on that map than any of the maps I've tried base building. I can do 2-4 tier 1 quests in a day, which is enough for me to buy all the water and teas I need, no dew collector required. It's gotten me thinking most of the people saying the change is no big deal are also people that quest and run POIs all the time, and so to them, literally nothing has changed from the way they played before, so to them, it IS no big deal because nothing changed.

When I say more annoying, it's because we went from having two viable ways to secure water (questing or gathering) to having one-ish (questing/POI running). A single Tier 1 quest will give you enough water for at least a day. A day of Tier 1s (4, maybe more if you rush it) will give you enough water to last a week. And the Vending Machine at the Trader will have enough fluid to give it to you. And if it doesn't, the Trader will. And if they somehow don't, there are other Vending Machines nearby, and all of these things restock every couple says.

Where's the "difficulty" here?

The difficulty didn't change at all. If anything, it's super easy too have all the water you need just by running a Tier 1 quest every other day. The only thing that changed is it's more onerous to get water if you don't like questing, and/or it's not possible to have sustainable water unless you have a yucca and berry farm in the snow biome. It made one playstyle less viable while not changing another playstyle, and so didn't make water management any more difficult, it just made one way that could be used non-viable while having no change to water management of another playstyle which was already easy to begin with.
Click to expand...


You are choosing to play the game a certain way that makes water survival easier. There are other ways to play that bring more of a water survival challenge. It's a choice and part of the sandbox element of playing 7 Days to Die. You can spam quests and ignore your base and have plenty of water or you can focus first on your base and do a couple of jobs a week and have a more challenging water survival experience. Not everyone can or wants to do 2-4 tier one quests per day. 

As for murky water loot amounts and vending machine availability I agree that more balancing is needed. Murky water used to be rarer in loot than it is now. I suspect they increased it in anticipation of larger teams of players playing and they may decide to make adjustments there. I think everyone agrees that the Duke economy is still a work in progress. I would expect the prices on drinks to eventually increase by quite a bit. Then again, there is also a wide range between players on how efficient they are at making money. Someone who can rake in the Dukes to always purchase their drinks easily will find the changes less impactful while others who are less savvy at trading won't be buying drinks so often.

All things said-- I agree that the feature still needs tuning. I disagree that the gameplay loop, itself, is annoying since I have witnessed many reports of people immensely enjoying it. I acknowledge that many people also don't enjoy it. All I can say is that TFP is aware.

 
I think still allowing the character to harvest the bodies of water 'somehow' - would at least be a comfortable middle ground.  Maybe water pumps you can put on the water blocks?

That's the same system (workstation collecting water) At least then, it wouldn't seem like the water is mostly just useless data on the map.  I mean you can of course drink it with your hands but that's about all it is good for now. The lakes of water on the map don't have much utility beyond scooping and drinking it dirty with your hands.  

The dew collector could be an easier item to build and start with - but slower. Then water pump would be more of an end game item. 

Still not perfect - I'd just rather have the water jars and dip them in the pools of water like the most basic of human concepts, but I'd be less disappointed if it at  least tiered out the water collection in different ways through workstations like pumps to take advantage of actual bodies of water just sitting there. 

Either way, I can live with the change as it is. Don't like it at all - but it's not a game-breaker. 

 
Doctor3D said:
I think still allowing the character to harvest the bodies of water 'somehow' - would at least be a comfortable middle ground.  Maybe water pumps you can put on the water blocks?

That's the same system (workstation collecting water) At least then, it wouldn't seem like the water is mostly just useless data on the map.  I mean you can of course drink it with your hands but that's about all it is good for now. The lakes of water on the map don't have much utility beyond scooping and drinking it dirty with your hands.  

The dew collector could be an easier item to build and start with - but slower. Then water pump would be more of an end game item. 

Still not perfect - I'd just rather have the water jars and dip them in the pools of water like the most basic of human concepts, but I'd be less disappointed if it at  least tiered out the water collection in different ways through workstations like pumps to take advantage of actual bodies of water just sitting there. 

Either way, I can live with the change as it is. Don't like it at all - but it's not a game-breaker. 
Click to expand...
I love this idea.  Add it after chem station, have it take a lot of forged steel, mechanical parts and electrical parts.  Maybe make it take a lot of springs since you can't craft those, so you have to plan ahead if you want multiple of you are concerned about it being too easy.  It should produce a decent amount of water a day, being a mid to end game item.  Let it generate a ton of heat if you want.  This could make standing water feel useful and not just something to look at.  Have it require regular repairs as well if your want. Whatever it would take to get it in the game.

You should create a new post in Pimp Dreams so it is more visible.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Are looting and the dew collector the only ways to get water now? I found a few bottles in loot, and I see the dew collector in the workbench section.

 
myrkana said:
Are looting and the dew collector the only ways to get water now? I found a few bottles in loot, and I see the dew collector in the workbench section.
Click to expand...
Pretty much.  You can drink water at the source but otherwise it's quest, loot, purchase, or dew collector.

 
Riamus said:
Pretty much.  You can drink water at the source but otherwise it's quest, loot, purchase, or dew collector.
Click to expand...
thanks :)  wanted to make sure I wasnt missing something. I havent paid much attention to the development, just checked in occasionally. I didnt even realise a21 was out until I happened to open steam today xD

 
The water system honestly sucks a lot. Everything else in this update was great. Wonderful optimizations, solid 120fps at ultra settings. Shooting through doors, being able to see how much you got when harvesting and total count, being able to see the POI and biome tier, and finally the better RWG changes.

But water, it's so stupid. I've only ever gotten water from the trader quests and vending machines. Everywhere else it's all murky water. You can't even put the water in a jar either, but you EAT the jar you just drank water out of? Someone said something a while back: "Technically you always have jars on you 24/7 when you drink from lakes and store it there", but if that were true, then surely I could just pick the water up with my hands and carry it to my campfires cooking pot. OR BETTER YET, I could just retrieve lake water WITH the cooking pot, now that's an idea!!

The changes to water are not only terribly unbalanced, they also ruin multiplayer badly. If I buy the water from a trader, neither can my friends, it makes multiplayer so much more tedious for no reason. Sure you can get that chance to receive 10 water from a trader quest, but is that REALLY reliable? Especially with the chance of spawning 1-2km from a trader at the beginning.

Water is my 2nd problem with the latest update, the other being that this alpha was rushed to stable because of the "summer sale". Other than those TWO things, the game has been really well polished and well designed overall!

 
Check toilets.  Every house has one or two and apartments has many.   If you take the right pills you can drink from any open water source, river/lake/ditches, with nothing in your hands without worrying about dysentery.  Take the pills before drinking the dirty water.  It is a survival game.

 
Doctor3D said:
I think still allowing the character to harvest the bodies of water 'somehow' - would at least be a comfortable middle ground.  Maybe water pumps you can put on the water blocks?

That's the same system (workstation collecting water) At least then, it wouldn't seem like the water is mostly just useless data on the map.  I mean you can of course drink it with your hands but that's about all it is good for now. The lakes of water on the map don't have much utility beyond scooping and drinking it dirty with your hands.  

The dew collector could be an easier item to build and start with - but slower. Then water pump would be more of an end game item. 

Still not perfect - I'd just rather have the water jars and dip them in the pools of water like the most basic of human concepts, but I'd be less disappointed if it at  least tiered out the water collection in different ways through workstations like pumps to take advantage of actual bodies of water just sitting there. 

Either way, I can live with the change as it is. Don't like it at all - but it's not a game-breaker. 
Click to expand...
I mean they still have the metal bucket in game.  Grab some water and make yourself a fountain.  Drink it with nothing in your hands.   They should add this in the in game Journal since I notice a lot of players seems to not know this....

 
Roland said:
 I felt disappointed both times I found the helmet water filter and simply sold them for money since I wanted to play the water survival gameplay because I think it's fun.
Click to expand...


Sounds more like you just enjoy crapping your pants from dysentery lol. You know that using a water filter mod would be considered part of water survival gameplay, right?

Sometimes I feel like you make up scenarios like this just to be contradictory and try and invalidate people's points of view.

 
AllTheGoodNamesAreInUse said:
That helps nothing with the water needed for crafting. Water needed for crafting is 10x the problem than drinking water is.
Click to expand...
If you take pills or use the filter mod on your hat you can drink from any ground water and use the lootable water for crafting.   Why waste water jars when you can drink from the ground?    There are multiple solutions in this game unless you refuse to do something.  Then that is you.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top